What is somatic work?
In Greek, the word “soma” means the body. But Thomas Hanna, who coined the term, expands on that definition: soma isn’t just your body. It’s you, the living, intelligent organism, and the felt sense of being you, right now, in this moment.
We live in a modern world that values thinking more than feeling. “I think, therefore I am.” How about: I just am? As kids, we experience emotions and sensations such as sadness, joy and pain in their raw form, and we express them by crying, shouting, or having a heartfelt laugh, without worrying about other people’s opinions.
Growing up, for all sorts of reasons such as environment and parenting, we learn that expressing emotion can endanger our safety and our belonging. So we push our emotions down. And our intelligent bodies store them deep in the hips, the shoulders, the jaw. Then the next time a trigger arrives, the same painful feeling comes back up. Because it was never processed by the body.
Somatics works with resilience.
Resilience is our inherent capacity to re-harmonize: to shift out of a hyper-alert, reactive state back into a calmer, more resourced, reconnected way of being. Re-harmonizing comes first. Connection, presence, and a positive sense of the future follow from it, not the other way around. As one of my teachers, Staci Haines, puts it:
“All the millions of ancestors at your back were resilient enough that you exist.”
Staci Haines, somatic educator
This is also why we work with resilience directly. Reconnecting with it builds the capacity to safely bring up events your body wasn’t able to process the first time, so you can actually process them now and move into a new somatic opening, rather than staying in the old pattern.
Why this is different from “just talking about it.”
Somatics starts from the inside: how does it actually feel in your body? In the chest, the jaw, the legs, right now? Most talk-based approaches, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), work top-down: think differently, and maybe the feeling follows. Somatics works bottom-up.
Talking gives you insight, and insight is real and useful. I’m not against it. But insight lives in the part of you that already knows how to analyze. One of my teachers always told me: you don’t wash blood with blood. Most of the problems we experience nowadays come from the mind: overthinking, depression, anxiety. We cannot use the mind alone to solve these problems.
A short video walking through the difference between working with the body and working with the story.
Embodiment is not about changing your thoughts.
Somatic coaching is not about “changing your thoughts” or pursuing change solely through conversation (although we can certainly talk about many things). It’s about engaging deeply with the body-mind, in a trauma-informed way, in order to pursue personal discovery, growth, and healing. Please be aware that within the container of this work, I do not assess, diagnose, or treat mental health disorders, nor do I provide primary crisis care, and this is not a substitute for licensed clinical psychotherapy.
Together, we build anchors and techniques you can come back to when you’re triggered. We build a compassionate container where we bring up events that were stored in the body, and use expressive methods (movement, painting, voice, and more) to express them. We create a space where the body, the mind, and the spirit meet.
Common goals for somatic coaching can include:
- Finding your passion in life
- Strengthening relationship skills
- Body-based expressive methods to release painful memories
- Expanding your capacity for self-compassion
- Releasing emotional barriers and painful stories
- Restoring connection to spirituality and greater meaning
- Working with meditation, breathwork, and guided visualization for trauma-informed emotional release
Somatics is for you if ...
You are amazing at thinking your way through everything, even emotions.
You can't switch off. Not in bed, not on vacation, not when nothing is even asking anything of you.
You already understand your patterns, and your body keeps doing them anyway.
Let's talk about where you want to go.
Thirty minutes, free, and entirely yours. We look at where you are now, where you would like to be, and what the work between those two points could look like.
Available in English or Persian.
Book a free discovery call